Goldengrove (9 page)

Aaron said, “Trust me. Nico. You’ll want to leave. Get back to me in three years.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. In three years we wouldn’t know each other. But no matter where we were, we’d always have this bond. “I’ll be ready to go by then. Probably.”

“For sure,” Aaron said.

The effort of imagining ourselves that far into the future pitched us into a silence so deep I thought we would never climb out. Aaron looked around the shop, at the books, the floor, the ceiling, his hands, his shoes, everywhere but at me. Which was how he was able to say, “That shirt looks good on you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It was Margaret’s.”

“I know that,” he said.

Obviously. How stupid of me. Aaron had super vision.

After that we just looked at each other. Margaret’s name was so powerful we expected . . . what? An earthquake to shake the books off the shelves? Actually, I expected my father to walk in and scare Aaron away and leave me alone with the staircase spirit telling me what I should have said.

I said, “My dad’s at the library.” Aaron understood. Whatever we wanted or needed to say, we’d better say it fast.

Aaron said, “I keep dreaming about her.”

“I do, too,” I said.

“In my dreams, she’s always alive.”

“I know,” I said. “Mine, too.” We were jabbering like passengers on a plane about to crash.

“I keep dreaming that they’ve rescued her, or that the whole thing never happened.”

“That’s strange,” I said. “
Really
strange. I keep dreaming she’s fine, and the two of you are sitting around my kitchen table.”

“That’s sort of like my dream, “ Aaron said. “How bizarre is that?”

“Totally,” I said.

“But actually,” he said, “the strangest part is that she was alive and now she isn’t. That’s the thing I can’t get past. I can’t get my head around it. The absence. How someone can be here one minute, and the next minute they’re gone. You tell them everything in your life and then they . . . can’t be reached. Unlisted number forever. I keep thinking that this little . . . episode, this little trick will end, and she’ll be back again, and it will all have been some cruel joke.”

He was saying what I’d so often thought but never said out loud. I was grateful he’d said it, if only
because
no one had. I was crying again, but silently now. I closed my eyes. I was afraid that seeing Aaron cry might mean we could never be friends. Which was pointless, because we
weren’t
friends. But maybe, I thought, we could be.

“I don’t know what to do,” Aaron said. “It’s relentless. Everything I do to cheer myself up only makes me feel worse. I go for a ride, get a burger, I can’t eat. I mean, how are we supposed to get through the day?”

Since when had Aaron and I become
we
? It was like Dad saying
we
needed to track down his doomsday cult. They were right.
We
were our own gang, our own separate tribe. The tiny band of survivors figuring out how to live without Margaret.

“I guess time’s got to pass.” I sounded like every well-meaning cornball who’d ever walked into the bookstore.

“So I hear,” said Aaron. “Meanwhile I can’t do anything I used to do with her.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I mean, me neither.”

“I can’t listen to music,” he said. “Me neither. I can’t watch old movies.”

“I can’t go anywhere near the lake.”

I said, “What’s left?”

Aaron said, “I can’t go through my entire life scared of music and swimming and ice cream.”

“I’ve been thinking that, too.”

There was nothing more to say. Aaron looked around, trying to find a book to pretend he’d come in to buy. I wondered why he
had
come in. Had he seen me through the window wearing Margaret’s shirt? I’d told his mother to tell him to stop by. His mother made him do it, and now he could tell her he had.

He seemed to be getting ready to leave when he said, “I have an idea. Have you ever heard about these courses they have to help people conquer their crazy phobias? Like people scared of flying. They make them sit in airplanes parked at the gate, they play them tapes of takeoff and landing. Ease them into it, step by step. What if
we
did something like that? Did stuff together. Little by little.”

I said, “There was a girl in my fifth-grade class with such bad claustrophobia she’d throw up if the teacher closed the classroom door. Her parents sent her to a special clinic. She told us she slept in a coffin. Probably she was lying. When she came back, she still got sick unless the door was open.”

“Autoimmunization,” said Aaron. “I read on the Internet about this guy who works with poisonous snakes, and he shoots himself up every day with teensy drops of venom, and now he can get bitten by a king cobra, it’s like a mosquito bite. That’s how some researcher discovered the cure for ulcers, plus another mad scientist tried it with DDT, sprinkling insecticide onto his family’s cornflakes.”

“That sounds sort of nuts.” I wondered where this was leading. My dad had been gone a long time. If I were alone, I’d worry about him being late. But with Aaron there, I was afraid that my father would walk in and interrupt us.

“We could try doing things we can’t do. Things we used to do with Margaret. We could do it together. An experiment.
You’re
the scientist, right?”

I thought, Breathe in. Breathe out.

Margaret used the word
experiment
for the games she invented. Early on, she figured out that the word would persuade me to play. Once, we’d darkened our rooms and lit candles. Margaret cut a deck of cards and wrote the card down and knocked on the wall. I closed my eyes and concentrated and wrote down the card I saw. We did it fifty times, reversed direction, did it fifty times more. I didn’t remember our score, but it was very high. We’d been proud of our closeness, our telepathic powers. It never made us feel crowded or spied on, the way it did when our mother knew what we were thinking.

I couldn’t decide whether I should be flattered that Aaron knew something about me—I was going to be a scientist—or insulted that, once again, Aaron and Margaret were the artists and I was the boring math dweeb. I was pleased that Aaron knew I was anything at all. I liked the idea of
experimenting
with our grief and fears.

Anyway, that’s what I told myself so as not to have to think about how excited I was by the prospect of hanging out with Aaron.

“Like what?” I said. “Do what?”

“Take a ride to the Dairy Divine. Have an ice cream for your sister.”

All the warm fellow feeling evaporated and left me sadder than before. I dream about her, I miss her. What was
that
about? Now he was suggesting we get in the car and just go get ice cream like we used to when my sister was alive?

“I don’t know if I could do that,” I said.

“I don’t know if I could either,” he said. “That’s why I thought I’d ask. I couldn’t do it alone, but maybe if I had company . . . someone who knew how hard it was, what it took to walk up to the counter and order.” He smiled. “You can get two different flavors, Nico. Three. You don’t have to decide. It’s on me.”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” said Aaron. “I understand why this might be tough. Think it over. Meanwhile, want to hear something else strange?”

I said, “I think I’ve had enough strangeness for one afternoon.”

He said, “That book you were looking at, the art book—”

I touched it under the counter, like a rabbit’s foot.

“I have that same book. Your sister loved it. I’d been saving up. I was planning to buy her a copy for Christmas. I guess she told you that, right?”

“No,” I said. “She never mentioned it.” I didn’t know which was more disturbing: the coincidence, or the fact that Margaret hadn’t told me about the book. Whenever she found anything she loved, she couldn’t enjoy it unless the whole world fell in love with it, too. One thing I’d liked about the book was its lack of painful associations. I’d discovered it on my own. Now that had been taken from me, and in its place was the thought that Margaret had, as Mrs. Akins promised, helped me find someone to help. For one shivery moment, I wondered if Aaron was lying. Why would he lie about a book and pretend that Margaret had liked it? On the other hand, why would someone get a book as a gift for a girl whose father owned a bookstore?

“Come on,” Aaron said. “There must have been a couple of things about your sister that you didn’t know.”

I didn’t want to hear what they were. I was sweating up Margaret’s shirt. I said, “Do you still have it?”

“What?” he said.

“The book.”

“Yeah, but I can’t look at it. You want it?

You can have it.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I can take this one home if I want. It’s so beautiful. It always makes me feel better. Did you ever notice how many paintings show angels saving people from shipwrecks and saints reviving drowned children and—”

“Who gives a rat’s ass about beauty, Nico? Where was that saint when—”

My father walked in.

I said, “Okay. Sure. Let me check. I don’t think we have it.”

Aaron registered something I wasn’t sure I liked him knowing. I would lie to my father for him. But that was hardly news. I’d lied to my parents every time Aaron and Margaret went out.

“Aaron, how are you?” Jolly Dad seemed pleased with himself for remembering Aaron’s name. He was acting as if Aaron were just one of Margaret’s friends. Polite but distracted, the way he always was with our friends, whose names he never remembered. Violet and Samantha thought my father was cute. I couldn’t believe I’d liked them. The screw-loose part, the squirrelly Little Adonis part—all that was forgotten, vanished into the foggy world that still had Margaret in it. In this new world, the one without her, Dad looked glad to see Aaron.

Before all that guy-on-guy goodwill disappeared, I said, “Dad, is it okay with you if we go get some ice cream?”

My father didn’t want me to go. I was his only Remaining Child. And some part of him remembered exactly who Aaron was. He was trying to be reasonable. Maybe it would be good for me to go. To do anything. The odds—I could watch Dad persuading himself—were that I’d survive.

“All right,” my father said. “But be back soon, okay? It’s almost time to close up.”

I didn’t mention that closing time wasn’t for two hours.

“Fasten your seat belt,” my father said.

“The Dairy Divine’s five minutes away,” I said. “Less.”

“Wear it,” said my father.

“I always do,” said Aaron.

“Especially if I’m going a short distance. They say most accidents happen within ten miles of your house.”

Accidents
, I thought.
Margaret
. What were Dad and Aaron
thinking
?

“I know,” Dad said. “That’s why I always drive like hell to get out of the danger zone.”

Aaron laughed. Dad said, “We’re kidding, Nico.”

I said, “
Three
miles. Lee Marvin says that in
Point Blank
.” Neither of them got it. It made me sad to see them joking like they could have when Aaron was Margaret’s boyfriend.

“Be back in half an hour,” Dad said. “But don’t rush. Drive slowly.”

Aaron and I were already out the door. Dad was still watching as we got into Aaron’s pale blue soccer-mom van, which— how had I not noticed?—was parked in front of the store. Dad, I thought, are you getting this? You couldn’t ask for anything safer! Not only was Aaron so cool that he could afford to drive the world’s most uncool vehicle, but he’d made it seem so cool that other kids had started asking their moms for their hand-me-down, high-mileage vans.

Then I stopped seeing it through Dad’s eyes and saw it through my own. I remembered how happy I’d always been to see the van outside the Rialto. The memory knocked the wind out of me. Aaron’s van was way high on the list of Margaret-related things. Everything else—music, films, the lake—slipped down a rung, like guests at a table shifting to make room for a late arrival. Aaron must already have managed to detach his van from my sister. Otherwise he could never have left the house. Maybe it was possible to decontaminate certain activities, the way flood victims wash the silt off family treasures and set them back on the mantel.

I slid in and fastened my seat belt. Aaron eased away from the pavement and drove a few blocks as if he was taking his road test. Then he hit the gas, and a warm wind roared into the window.

“Jailbreak,” Aaron said.

I waited for self-consciousness to leave me paralyzed and mute. In fact I felt oddly relaxed. I didn’t have to talk, because Aaron already understood the most important things: the mornings, the dead of night, the dreams, hearing Margaret’s voice. It was as if his sharing the weight made the heaviness lighter. I felt free, or anyway, freer than I had in weeks. But as we rounded a curve in the road and the Dairy Divine appeared, I remembered we weren’t free. We’d dragged our prison along with us.

“Is something wrong?” said Aaron. I must have looked as if I had no idea how someone opened a car door.

“No, why?”

“You seem like you’re about to lose it again.”

“I’m not. I’m fine,” I lied.

A girl I’d never seen before was working behind the counter. She wore a long black vampire dress and a checked farmer’s handkerchief tied backward over her dead, inky hair. One nostril looked red and swollen, as if from an infected piercing.

“What’ll it be?” she asked the wall behind us. She didn’t seem like someone who’d be patient when I took all day deciding. Nor did she seem aware that Aaron was the sole surviving member of a royal couple.

I half wanted Aaron to explain who we used to be, what we’d been through, and that this was no ordinary out-for-ice-cream excursion. That’s what she must have thought. A good-looking guy was taking his little sister for a ride. Maybe he’d stayed out late last night and needed to get off Mom’s shit list.

“What’ll it be?” she repeated, to Aaron this time.

I adored Aaron for ignoring her. “Get what
you
want, Nico. Take your time.”